I got into college. Not just one college, but damn near all of them, including Stanford, and I’d been gathering up all my acceptances to surprise Adela. But when I sat down across from her at the picnic table, something was wrong.
Adela’s eyes were all swollen like a captive goldfish, like the ones I’d see in the pet store the next town over whenever I begged Pawpaw to take me as a kid. Something was different about her, had been for the last few weeks maybe, since the orca and the snake and the bayou. Something in those eyes, in the way her shoulders slouched.
I still thought about that orca every day, but I’d accepted that everyone else thought I was crazy for it. Same way they thought I was crazy for applying to colleges on the other side of the country. Same way they thought I was crazy for wanting to go to college at all. That was the way things always went for me. Everyone brushed me off, hoping I’d shut my mouth about the things that buzzed inside me like a swarm of moths in the harsh glow of a flashlight. I was used to a dark and sad world, so I concealed all my light inside me and dreamed about my orca and the life she’d lived on my own time.
I imagined my orca’s ma circling the waters of Texas looking for her baby, calling out again and again. I imagined her wishing she’d followed her child or kept her close for a few more months, till she was ready to go off alone. And then I imagined my orca’s ma continuing to swim with the pod, deciding she’d leave behind the child that didn’t know better than to find her way back.
After all, don’t most mothers turn the fault on their babies when the guilt’s too much to bear? That’s what mine did, and then she dropped me off at Grammy and Pawpaw’s and never came back.
At the picnic table, I waved the orca from my mind and focused in on Adela. Before I could tell her about my good news, I had to make sure she was okay, because I loved her and that’s what you did when you loved someone. Except I almost wish I hadn’t, that I’d just kept my mind floating in the ocean with the orca’s ma. I didn’t, though.
At the table over lunch, Kai now old enough he was holding his head up all by himself, staring at the trees, I asked Adela a question I couldn’t take back.
“What’s wrong?”
She tilted her head. “What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong.”
“Yes, it is. Don’t pretend with me, Adela. I know you.”
It’s true, I did. She was my best friend, after all. Even if I wanted more. Even if she wanted more. She was the best friend I’d ever had. Maybe the only real friend outside the Girls, and they didn’t count ’cause they were family.
When I was eight, I thought I’d made my first real friend. At that point, my auntie and my cousins had moved up to Georgia to be closer to my uncle and we’d moved into their house on the inland side of the highway. I’d gotten used to the way Pawpaw put hot sauce on his pancakes in the morning, the tickle of Grammy’s brush through my hair in the evenings, the boring church service I was forced to go to every Sunday.
I went to school like anybody else, but I wasn’t used to playing with other kids who weren’t my cousins, and I didn’t know how to introduce myself to anybody, so I’d go up to people and ask if they wanted to be my friend and, to any five-year-old, that’s an invitation for ridicule, so I mostly played alone. Then, ’cause I refused to write my name or some silly thing like that, my kindergarten teacher told Grammy it’d be best to hold me back for another year, so every year after that I was the oldest in my class and somehow that made the other kids wanna be my friend even less. But, in second grade, I met Sylvia.
Sylvia liked to play with the class pet, a turtle, just as much as I did, so we’d watch him and feed him side by side till, one day, I asked if Sylvia wanted to have a sleepover. I’d heard the other girls in my class talking about sleepovers and I wanted to give it a try. To my surprise, Sylvia said yes. Her ma and Grammy coordinated and the next Thursday, Grammy picked us both up from school and walked us back to my house.
Sylvia and me watched Lilo & Stitch on DVD and then, when it got dark, Pawpaw kicked us out of the living room for his episode of Dateline. But instead of going to sleep, me and Sylvia whispered to each other all our fantasies about being ballerinas and finding princes and getting pet pit bulls. Sylvia started to get sleepy, quiet, but I was wide-awake and I just didn’t want the night to end, so I asked Sylvia if she wanted to see something and Sylvia said yes. I pulled down my underwear and lifted up my nightgown and put a finger into my privates and started moving it around.
“What are you doing?” Sylvia whispered. She looked confused.
I was just happy to be the one who knew more and so I helped Sylvia out and pulled her dress up.
“It feels good. Try it.”
Sylvia copied me and slipped her finger inside herself.
“I don’t like it,” Sylvia said. “It’s where the pee comes from.”
“You’re not doing it right,” I insisted.
“Whatever. I’m going to sleep.”
Sylvia pulled her underwear up, turned onto her stomach, and fell asleep within minutes. I just had to lay there, wondering why Sylvia didn’t like it and if she was doing it wrong even though I wasn’t really sure what “it” was, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk about it anyway.
On Friday evening, the phone rang and Grammy swept into my room, eyes frantic and twitching. She grabbed me up and slammed me into my time-out chair and started screaming about how Sylvia’s mother called and I was dirty and I’d ruined the family name and now how was she ever gonna show herself at church again, huh? What was she supposed to say to Pawpaw? And even when I spent the rest of the night in my time-out chair sobbing, Grammy didn’t take me into her lap and hold me like usual. She didn’t apologize and ask me any questions.
In fact, she didn’t talk to me at all that weekend. She set some food outside my bedroom door at each meal and then, on Monday morning, she took me outside the house and she pointed down the street.
“See up there? You take a right up there and then another right when you get to the stop sign. Come back the same way after school. And if Sylvia tries to talk to you, ignore her. Or even better, tell her she’s lying.” And then Grammy went back inside the house, locked the door, and she never walked me to school or back home again. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers after that.
It wasn’t like Grammy or Pawpaw were cruel. They were actually about the friendliest people in town, anyone would tell you, but they didn’t mess around with any tomfoolery. It took me a couple of years to figure out that meant they liked a secret kept exactly where a secret was meant to go: the bottom of the ocean, where you couldn’t find it even if you had a scuba mask and some flippers.
After Sylvia, I decided friendship was a risk not worth taking. I was sure that if anyone got too close to me, they might not want to be my friend at all. Adela was the first person to disprove that. As much as I loved her, wanted to run my hands along the ridges of her shoulders and feel her lips smeared in Vaseline, I also loved just being her friend. And as her friend, I couldn’t ignore when something was wrong. Especially ’cause I was still waiting for her to tell me the truth. About her feelings for me. And every question I asked was secretly a hope it’d lead back to that.
At the picnic table, Adela looked over at Kai, reached her hand out and offered him her index finger to grasp, and she didn’t even look at me when she said the next thing. “Remember when I said I was in love?”
My chest swelled up like Adela’s eyes, so tight not even a whistle could find its way through my lungs. This might be it. I nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at me.
“Well, the guy I’m in love with found out I was pregnant a few weeks ago and I—well, I let him think it was his. So nothing’s wrong. Actually, everything’s great, I’m just scared I made the wrong choice.” Finally, she looked at me. “What do you think?”
I wasn’t prepared to hear it. That’s the worst part of it all: I actually thought she loved me. I’d never paused to think that maybe Adela only winked at me as her best friend. That she disappeared for more reasons than just communing with the water alone. That she might have someone else I knew nothing about.
Since the hurricane party, we spent our afternoons after school laid out on the beach or the floor of her grandma’s living room listening to the old CDs her grandma kept around. We wheezed in fits of funny, watched reruns of TV shows Adela’d never even heard of before she came down here, told each other the kinds of things you tell your diary. I was the pages she could pour into, and I did the same for her. On Friday nights, sometimes I slept over, in her bed, knotted in the sheets. Wishing she’d come closer.
For months, I’d been so sure every tell and sign was meant for me. When she rolled over in the middle of the night and her knee touched my thigh. When she asked for help getting up the dunes and I pulled her with me, and she kept holding my hand even after we made it down to the road. When she talked about the feeling of love, vague but vibrant, and I thought she might just finally say she felt it all for me.
I tricked myself into seeing it all through a murky film, like the bayou’s surface skimmed in dirt. Maybe that’s how the baby orca got so lost, thinking the sound of a giant ship passing by was the call of her mother until she was too far to hear anything at all.
Unrequited love is like believing in fairies for a little too long, past the age it’s acceptable. Sure, there’s the eventual devastation that this thing you thought was real suddenly evaporated into nothing. But the worst part of it is the shame that you ever believed at all.
I choked on my own exhale. There Adela was, her finger in my son’s hand, across a picnic table from me, asking for advice about a boy like she hadn’t just destroyed me.
“Um, I don’t know. Maybe you should ask someone else.”
I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t talk to her about this, not without crying, and if I cried then she’d start asking me what was wrong, and I’d have to confess that I believed in fairies and miracles and she had just crushed my faith between her molars on a Tuesday afternoon.
I stood up and grabbed Kai as he shrieked and tried to pull Adela’s finger with us. I raced away before she could follow, before she could ask anything, ’cause I couldn’t answer her, I wouldn’t, and when I shut the front door of my house with us inside, I called out for Pawpaw and Grammy and when no one responded, I let myself sob.
Kai, on my hip, put his whole hand in his mouth and sucked, looking around at our living room like he’d never seen it before and, to be honest, it felt like I hadn’t either. Adela Woods had broken my heart, and nothing would ever return to the way it was before.